22 April,
Poetry /
Poetry Reading: Vona Groarke and Jessica Traynor
Wednesday, 22 April 2026, 4:00pm
The Mick Lally Theatre / €10/12
Book NowWe are delighted to welcome two remarkable poets to Cúirt. Their poetry is written in precise, luminous language, exploring identity and deconstruction with playfulness and wit.
The Current Ireland Professor of Poetry, Vona Groarke’s ninth collection Infinity Pool explores the thin veil between poetry and the world it seeks to process. These poems write into the point where anything might slip into something else – the Atlantic become an actor; a luggage carousel be a reckoning; a poem nudges itself gently over its own fourth wall.
Jessica Traynor’s fourth collection New Arcana explores grief, bad boyfriends, and the power of female friendship through readings of the Tarot and Tim Burton movies.
Vona has published fifteen books, including nine collections of poetry with The Gallery Press, most recently Infinity Pool, shortlisted for the 2025 T.S. Eliot Prize.
Hereafter: The Telling Life of Ellen O’Hara – a poetic account of Irish women domestic servants in 1890s New York, which arose out of her time as a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library 2018-19, won the 2024 Michel Déon Award.
Her Selected Poems was awarded the 2017 Piggott Prize for Best Irish Poetry Collection. Recent poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry (Chicago), The Poetry Review, New York Review of Books, and the TLS.
A 2017 recipient of the Irish Literary Hall of Fame Award, she is a member of Aosdána, (Irish Academy of the Arts), and of the U.K.’s Royal Society of Literature.
Former editor of Poetry Ireland Review and poetry critic for the Irish Times, she is Writer in Residence at St John’s College, Cambridge (2022-26) and, in September 2025, was inaugurated by President Michael D. Higgins as the tenth Ireland Professor of Poetry (2025-28).
Jessica is a poet and essayist. She is poetry editor at Banshee. Her first collection Liffey Swim was published by Dedalus Press in 2014 and shortlisted for the Strong/Shine Award. The Quick (Dedalus Press) followed in 2018 and was an Irish Times Book of the Year. Her third poetry collection, Pit Lullabies (Bloodaxe, 2022), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, an Irish Times book of the year, and a Guardian Best Summer Read of 2022. It was shortlisted for the Yeats Society Sligo/ Irish Independent Poetry Prize. New Arcana (Bloodaxe, 2025) was an RTÉ and Irish Independent Book of the Year.
She is a 2025 EU Press Prize Laureate, was 2024 recipient of the Tundish Award from Field Day for contributions to the arts in Ireland, and the 2023 recipient of the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Irish Poetry. Other awards include the Listowel Poetry Prize, the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary, and Hennessy New Writer of the Year. In 2016, she was named one of the Poetry Ireland Rising Generation of poets.
